The Secrets of Excel form Exposed!

Using Excel form can help you to save money. Don't believe? Then read what
Hwee Choon of National Council of Social Service has to say about the
excel form:

Excel is a powerful tool for designing my questionnaire for manpower
survey as I can save money on temp staff
to do data entry! It helps me
greatly in my analysis of data too as
I can customise what information
to retrieve and how to present my results.

If you are thinking that it is a normal form with boxes made of the cells,
then you are absolutely wrong! She is referring to
professional looking forms
that consist of option buttons, checkboxes, dropdown boxes, etc for use in
Customer Satisfaction Feedback, Expense Claims, Reservations, Purchase
Requisition, etc. Here is my feedback form created in Excel.

Not only can Hwee Choon do that with Excel forms, she can also
effectively collect the data
from each form in 1 to 2 seconds.
That's right, this is how fast it is, no typo. And no macro is required.
All she needs is to perform a copy & paste action and the data would sit
neatly in the database. And the same amount of time is required irregardless
of the number of questions in the form. Based on a form of 10
questions, a temp staff or anybody is likely to copy and paste the
answers 10 times. That represents
a savings of 90%. With this Excel form,
would you then need a temp staff to do the job? And if you are thinking
of creating an online survey form, you would need to get a programmer to
create the page and capture the results into a database. Unless you have
tons of responses, this method would not be cost effective either.

Here are some others who have also benefited from the lesson on forms.

"Conditional formatting and creation of a survey form using the functions in excel
are very useful for me to do my work more quickly. Conditional formating is very
useful in performance tracking." Alicia Chay, Senior Executive (Corporate Development), National Council of Social Service

"In the process of creating a new contract that requires data for
collation, lesson on forms showed me how to do this." Sherrie Ang, Associate Director (Sales and Marketing), Abacus International

I used exactly the same process to collect the feedback from the
participants and perform some
business intelligence activity with
the data to understand my participants' profile. And here is what
I found using pivot table charts, another requested module from
the course.

The chart presented the profile for my participants with majority of
them having at least 5 years of experience working with Excel and
almost all of them having at least 2 years of experience working with
Excel, matching the profile I have stated in my email.

To satisfy my own curiosity (anyway, it's a
split second job involving a
drag and drop action),
I decided to plot the profile against the estimated
time savings the participants have gained after attending the course. I was
totally surprised at my findings.

I had assumed that those who have lesser experience would have benefited
from the course as compared to those who has been working with Excel for
longer period of time. I was totally wrong! It is the reverse with those
having more years of experience
working with Excel gaining 40 to 60% of
time savings after attending the course. And
at least 30% time savings for
almost all the participants.

And to eradicate the misconception that Excel is only for finance or
accounting people, I decided to collect data on the business functions
of my participants. And guess what, there is not a single finance person
in this run (I do have some CFOs and accountants attending my earlier
classes though). And the pivot chart shows that
Excel is used in different business
functions, from corporate development and logistics. And I am pretty sure
that there are many other functions (not presented here) that would need
Excel to improve their work efficiency too.